


And The Children Metallic In Their Beds

by Skywalker



Category: Aldnoah.Zero (Anime)
Genre: Blood Donation, Cancer, Gen, Loss of Parent(s), Mars, Pretentious, ancient aliens - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-25
Updated: 2014-08-25
Packaged: 2018-02-14 15:17:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,106
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2196702
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Skywalker/pseuds/Skywalker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Slaine goes to Mars and has horrible nightmares about the planet turning him into something new. Or: a tragic explanation for why Slaine has no pupils. Or: I ripped off "Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed." Also: Slaine's dad dies.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**i. The biggest crime of all was that she had come here only five years ago from Earth, and she remembered the sun and the way the sun was and the sky was when she was four in Ohio.**

 

He doesn’t like Vers, except for her.

It isn’t because it’s new. He’s been moved around as long as he remember, boarding schools most of the year and to his father’s newest research sites during the summer. It isn’t because it’s lifeless. He has followed his father to less hospitable deserts and tundras. He has spent summers in vast stretches of brown nothingness without too many complaints. It isn’t because it’s far from home. He likes to travel, and in any case, home is where his father is, and his father is here. 

As a matter of fact, he has no problem with being on the planet Mars at all. But he doesn’t like _Vers_ , except for her. 

He had always gotten on well with the boys at school, and the children who surround him on field expeditions, and the graduate students who tripped over themselves tutoring him in their increasingly arcane fields in order to curry favor with his father. He had never lacked playmates for soccer or adults to answer thoughtful questions. 

But here, the noble children stick up their noses at him, or else mimic their parents and speak to him in lofty, snide tones. They hate him for the minutes she spends with him. The common children in the crowded city stick up their noses at him, and speak to him in lofty, snide tones. They hate him for the hours the noble children spend with him. Roses and weeds alike, they hate him, for all these reasons of big and little consequence. He avoids adults wherever he can, aside from his father’s few friends.

He gives up on Vers. He buries himself in books. He daydreams of returning Earth, and of her, until the radiation sickness kicks in.

The thing is, he was never supposed to arrive on Mars in an escape rocket. He was supposed to arrive on one of the regular shuttles between the Moon and Mars, one of the safe, routine shuttles had had been running for years. The shuttle had just slipped into the planet’s gravity well when a massive, accelerating something hit it. Debris wasn’t supposed to be able to take out a Vers transport, but this projectile did, slamming into the viewport in a flurry of black and red. It was the darkness of space and the crimson of Martian dust, visible only for a moment until all the lights in the cabin went out, and his father had hustled him into an escape pod. He plummeted, and remembered nothing until the rocket’s metal cooled in the still, wet air and its lid gave a bulging pop. 

Of all the passengers on the shuttle, only he and his father survived. When Slaine thinks about it, it doesn’t make sense. They shouldn’t have been able to land gently enough to survive, not unless something caught them, cushioning their fall. His father calls him clever when he mentions it and asks to see his math, and unweaves the idea by finding an error somewhere in the equations he’s used, and so the shroud is incomplete when Slaine and then his father begin to die. There wasn’t enough radiation shielding on the shuttles, and they’d avoided dying in space only to die on Mars. And so Slaine’s question quickly goes from _why am I alive?_ to _how do I stay alive_?

She saves them again. The knights, even her own grandfather, object, but she overrules them. She wants him to live, and she doesn’t see any reason she can’t give him a stem cell transfusion when the doctors say it could save him. So the doctors fill him and his father with chemicals, and when their bodies are too weak to fight off any invasion, fill them with her blood. It takes root.

And then he learns to dislike Mars, too.

 

_( Saazbaum looks at the boy spread on Dioscuria’s open palm. Five years ago, he held the same boy in the same hand, stopping a small escape rocket from smashing against the dusty seas of Mars, and letting it slip through his fingers into the little princess’s wing of the palace. It had seemed so natural when they became playmates. There was nothing natural about it._

_Five years ago, he poisoned this same boy, then very, very quietly persuaded the emperor to allow the little princess to save his life. Ray Vers Raygalia was a brilliant scientist, once, but it never occurred to the old man that Saazbaum and Doctor Troyard were crafting a chimera._

_It never occurred to the old man that Aldnoah obeys blood. )_


	2. Chapter 2

**ii. “Sometimes growing children’s eyes change color.” “Maybe we’re children, too. At least to Mars.”**

 

“I hear them,” he sobs. He’s eleven years old and clutching at his father like a toddler, but he’s too sick and terrified to be embarrassed. “They’re in the lights and I hear them—”

“It was just a dream,” his father soothes, patting his shoulder. 

“—and I hear them when I’m awake!” he protests. 

“Who do you hear?” It’s the same tone his father would use when asking Slaine about his homework, a scientist’s affectionate but precise concern, even though his father is as weak as Slaine himself in the aftermath of the transfusion. Slaine has never mastered that voice. 

“The Martians,” he hiccups, wiping his own snotty nose on his pajamas. 

“There haven’t been any for thirty thousand years. You’re just imagining things – hypothesizing things, maybe. You see a piece of their technology, and think about the maker, and then what they’d say…”

Slaine nods, tear-streaked, and lets his father put him back to bed. As he huddles miserably in the light, just before he falls asleep, he realizes that this explanation doesn’t make sense. He’d been living in the ruins of Martian technology for months before he started hearing them; why would he start imagining now....

The thought slipped away as he sank more deeply into his pillow, and never came again.

*

They told him recovery would be painful. He couldn’t be exposed to anything that might make him sick, not while his body was still weak. He spends most of his time lying in bed, too tired to even hold a book. He listens to the wind slamming dust into the palace and off to the plains and mountains, and dreams that it is carrying pieces of himself away, as well. His hair whipped away as mountain snow, his blood as a drop in a sea of red dust, leaving only bones lying on the floor of a dry Martian sea…

“Too much imagination,” his father murmurs, and smiles as he runs his hair over the prickly stubble where Slaine’s hair is starting to grow back after the chemotherapy. “You may be right about the hair, though.”

Slaine offers a weak smile in return, and presses closer against his father, as though seeking protection from the wind. 

*

She insists that she be the first person besides his father and the doctors to see him, and, as the princess royal of Vers, no one is willing to deny her. She sits at his bedside and tells him everything he’s missed, and some things he hasn’t missed at all, but she just wanted someone to talk to about. He indulges her, propped up on pillows, until he can’t keep his eyes open. They get heavier, and heavier, and he hears the wind and voices whispering…

“Slaine?”

He jerks upright. “P-princess!” She’s been very kind to visit, very kind on top of saving his life twice, and it’s rude to doze off on a princess or a friend. 

“It’s time for me to go, isn’t it?” she asks, with a tiny smile.

“No, not at all…”

“I’ll be back tomorrow,” she promises, but something makes her tilt her head, confused. “Have your eyes always been that green?” she asks, leaning in close.

“I don’t know,” he blushes, very aware of her closeness, “princess.”

“Maybe because you have some of me in you,” she says happily, and he gives a tiny sigh of relief as she sits back. His father assures him that transfusions don’t work like that, and he starts to explain the science behind it, how it’s impossible for him to really change like that…

But when she leaves, he dreams of being bleached-coral bones at the floor of an alien sea, while Mars itself rebuilds him.

*

Thin and pale, he spent most of his time with the princess. As he gets better, he starts telling her about Earth, to drive away the feeling the Mars is shifting, shaping, melting his bones and building someone new around them. He talks about the cries of animals, to drown the voices. He talks about the blue of the sky and sea, to wipe away the image of his blood swirling away in the wind. He talks about the planet mending itself, so he doesn’t have to think about the fact that his father isn’t getting better.

She falls in love with Earth. He falls in love with her. 

*

His father dies two years later.

His father’s friends are all in orbit around the moon, so the funeral is a quiet one. The wind sweeps the ashes off to the plains and mountains in a deep, charcoal cloud, standing out stark and alien. It’s not the white of mountain snows, not the red of swirling dust. There are no bones to be molded on the floor of a Martian sea. Mars has rejected his father, utterly. 

The friend of a father’s friend offers, distastefully, to give him a place on a Landing Castle. Slaine has never wanted to be a soldier, but he can’t stay on this planet any longer without protection from the wind. He’ll leave the misery and the voices behind.

It isn’t just dislike anymore. He hates Mars, except for her.

 

_( He didn’t look like much, battered and unconscious in the castle’s medical center. That could be fixed. Saazbaum had shaped him once, into an embodiment of the power of gods. Shaping him into a weapon would be simple by comparison._

_The United Forces, the remaining castles, the imperial family – none of them would survive an unexpected attack from a pilot with activation authority. )_


	3. Chapter 3

**iii. “I have something to fight for and live for; that makes me a better killer. I've got what amounts to a religion now. It's learning how to breathe all over again.”**

 

“This is – Tharsis?” he gasps, his eyes going wide. “Milord Saazbaum, where did you – ?”

“It was removed from the traitor’s castle,” Saazbaum says. “I thought you might have a use for it, as you search for her highness and for traitors among the Orbital Knights.”

Slaine’s eyes widen even further, overwhelmed by the trust Saazbaum seems willing to place in him, and he slumps a little, disappointed that he’s going to disappoint his father’s old friend. “The Aldnoah drive is out,” he says, pointing to the dark hole in Kataphract’s torso. “No one will be able to use it until we find her highness or it’s returned to Vers.” 

Saazbaum surprises him by gesturing his attendants out, then turning his full, intent gaze on Slaine. Slaine had forgotten how eerie it felt to have those gray eyes focused on him, as though Saazbaum could strip him to a pile of coral-white bones. “I would like you to try. Consider it a whim.” 

There’s nothing in his voice that suggests it’s a whim, however, leaving Slaine feeling suspicious and uneasy as he scrambles over the catwalks to swing into the Kataphract’s core. In a functional Kataphract, the Aldnoah drive would be here, blazing steadily and protected at the heart of the Kat. With Cruhteo dead, Saazbaum’s technicians have pried this cavity open, exposing the pale sphere to the elements. Feeling foolish, he reaches out a hand –

An unseen wind ruffles his hair, as though it wants to carry it all the way back to Mars, and his blood runs cold in his veins. The wind whispers wordlessly with voices he once ran from Mars to the moon to hide from. But as he touches the drive, he understands what they are, and he refuses to let them scare him away. They’ve already done their worst to him. 

“Awaken, Aldnoah,” he orders. 

He hates Mars, but he’ll use all its eerie power to save her. 

 

_( Saazbaum smiles as the weapon comes to life. )_

**Author's Note:**

> The header quotes and the better imagery come from “All Summer in a Day,” “Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed,” and “And the Moon be Still as Bright.” The title is also a line from “Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed.”
> 
> I can't believe "ancient aliens" isn't already a tag.


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